Howl (Live)

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness
Starving, hysterical, naked
Dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
Looking for an angry fix
Angel headed hipsters
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in
the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats
floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw
Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and
Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear,
burning their money in wastebaskets and
listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning
through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs,
with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the
mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson,
illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns,
wine drunkenness over the rooftops,
storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light,
sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter
dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery
to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children
brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak
of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and
sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate
Fugazzi's, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to
pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the
stoops off fire escapes off
windowsills off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and
anecdotes and eyeball kicks and
shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and
nights with brilliant eyes,
meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a
trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and
migraines of China under
junk-withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad
yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing
through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St.
John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because
the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking
visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when
Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on
the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex
or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about
America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing
but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and
ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and
shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their
dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms
protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and
undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down,
and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked
and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in
policecars for committing no crime but their
own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were
dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by
saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim,
the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the
grass of public parks and cemeteries
scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob
behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the
blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed
shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of
the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her
ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a
sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed,
and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on
the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and
come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset,
and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch
of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.
C., secret hero of these poems,
cocksman and Adonis of Denver—joy to the memory of his innumerable
lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards,
moviehouses' rickety rows,
on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar
roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially
secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams,
woke on a sudden Manhattan,
and picked themselves up out of basements hung-over with heartless
Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron
dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank
docks waiting for a door in the East River
to open to a room full of steam-heat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the
Hudson under the wartime blur floodlight of the moon
& their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested
the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with
their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the
bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame
under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty
incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail
borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for
Eternity outside of Time,
& alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully,
gave up and were forced to open antique stores
where they thought they were growing old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison
Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the
iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies
of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent
editors, or were run down by the
drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked
away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of
Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair,
fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic,
leaped on negroes, cried all over the street,
danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of
nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw
up groaning into the bloody toilet,
moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each
other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude
watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a
vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver,
who came back to Denver & waited in vain,
who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally
went away to find out the Time,
& now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each
other's salvation and light and breasts,
until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible
criminals with golden heads and the charm of
reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit,
or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern
Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to
Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism
& were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently
presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven
heads and harlequin speech of
suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol
electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy
occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one
symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood,
and tears and fingers,
to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls,
bickering with the echoes of the soul,
rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of
love, dream of life a nightmare,
bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother finally,
and the last fantastic book flung out of the
tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.
M.
and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last
furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture,
a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet,
and even that imaginary,
nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination—
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe,
and now you're really in the total animal soup of time—
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden
flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipsis
catalogue a variable measure and the vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images
juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual
images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of
consciousness together jumping with
sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand
before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame,
rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to
the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown,
yet putting down here what might be
left to say in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn
shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for
love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani
saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life
butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years